Roadmap

Hydrogen, scaling up

The Hydrogen Council is the largest industry-led effort to develop the hydrogen economy. Launched in January 2017 at the World Economic Forum, its members include leading companies that invest along the hydrogen value chain, including transportation, industry, and energy exploration, production, and distribution.
As members of the Council, we are convinced that hydrogen can offer economically viable, financially attractive, and socially beneficial solutions. Furthermore, in certain sectors and geographies it will be unavoidable to enable the energy transition and improve air quality in cities.

The Roadmap

In this report, we present the first comprehensive vision of the long-term potential of hydrogen and a roadmap for deployment. This ambitious yet realistic approach would deliver deep decarbonization of transport, industry, and buildings, and enable a renewable energy production and distribution system. To realize this vision, investors, industry, and government will need to ramp up and coordinate their efforts.

Our vision: The hydrogen economy in 2050

Hydrogen is a central pillar of the energy transformation required to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius. To achieve the two-degree scenario, the world will need to make dramatic changes year after year and decrease energy-related CO2 emissions by 60% until 2050 – even as the population grows by more than 2 billion people and billions of citizens in emerging markets join the global middle class. Hydrogen can play seven major roles in this transformation:

The Roadmap: Hydrogen, scaling up

The report shows that by 2050, hydrogen could meet 18% of the world’s final energy demands, avoid 6 Gt of CO2 emissions, i.e. 20% of CO2 emission reduction targets by 2050, create a market with revenues of 2.5 trillion dollars each year, provide 30 million jobs and reduce C02 in sectors like transport, industry and residential by between 40% and 60%.